Tag: national gallery

Another year has passed and sadly I’ve been too occupied to write properly this year! However, my Instagram has been very active indeed with short reviews and nuggets of art-historical information. I also published a number of book reviews on the Museum Bookstore website, writing about Michelangelo and Andrea del Sarto. 2018 has been a…

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone! As festive cheer spreads throughout the country, let’s look at some of the best exhibitions this year. Below are my top 5 exhibitions of 2017 in London, in addition to some special honourable mentions:

When the National Gallery acquired Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) in 1842, it was the only pristine example of early Netherlandish painting from this period in their collection. Van Eyck had also been erroneously credited as the inventor of oil painting, a sixteenth-century myth invented by Giorgio Vasari in Italy and perpetuated by Karel…

‘All the discords that arose between Pope Julius and me were owing to the envy of Bramante and Raphael of Urbino […] And Raphael had good reason to be envious, since what he knew of art he learnt from me.’ (Michelangelo from Rome to an unknown addressee, October-November 1542) What do you get when you…

Over the weekend the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden launched its annual contemporary arts festival Deloitte Ignite, now in its seventh year, with a series of free public events. The month-long festival (5th-28th September 2014) brings together dance and the visual arts, leading to a collaboration between the Royal Ballet and the National Gallery’s…

Dear readers. How often do you look carefully at the buildings portrayed in paintings? How many times have you focused on the painted surroundings more than the figures in the image? For the majority of you, “very little” is likely to be your response. Building the Picture attempts to reverse this, forcing us to look…

Drawing many a crowd to one of London’s busiest squares, two world-famous paintings by none other than the Dutch Impressionist Vincent van Gogh have been reunited in Room 46 of the National Gallery for the first time in 65 years. The reunion was made possible by the friendship between the National Gallery and the Van…

If there was only one word to describe the works in this exhibition, it would be this: big. The National Gallery’s Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice brings together 50 paintings by the wonderful Paolo Veronese in the UK’s first ever monographic exhibition of the artist. And boy, did they do an impressive job! Unfaithfulness and…

Vienna, also known as the City of Music, was an area where many great composers found their place in musical history, icons such as Mozart, Brahms and Mahler. Theatres and opera houses filled the city with world-class music, attracting tourists and immigrants from across the Empire. During the years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918), Vienna…

I assume many of us are familiar with Johannes Vermeer’s painterly masterpiece entitled Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), on display at the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshius in The Hague, the Netherlands. Well, unfortunately, the National Gallery’s latest exhibition doesn’t have anything to do with this painting, but it draws on a theme that…

Established in 1932 by Dame Martha Constance Hattie Barber – known simply as Lady Barber – and Henry Barber, the Barber Institute of Fine Arts is a research and partnership institute with a mission to “promote the study and encouragement of art and music for the benefit of the University of Birmingham and the wider…